Whither Fanon?: Studies in the Blackness of Being

Of Effacement

Blackness and Non-Being

David Marriott

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2024 by David Marriott. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marriott, D. S., author.

Title: Of effacement : blackness and non-being / David Marriott.

Other titles: Inventions (Series)

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Series: Inventions: black philosophy, politics, aesthetics | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023018087 (print) | LCCN 2023018088 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503628786 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503637252 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503637269 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, Black. | Black people—Race identity—Philosophy. | Identity (Philosophical concept)

Classification: LCC B808.8 .M37 2023 (print) | LCC B808.8 (ebook) | DDC 126—dc23/eng/20230726

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018087

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018088

Text design: Elliott Beard

Typeset by Motto Publishing Services in 10/14.75 Freight Text Pro

Inventions Black Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics

Edited by David Marriott

Contents

Preface

PART I: ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE

One: N’est Pas

Two: Nigra Philologica

Three: Nègre, Figura

Four: Ontology and Lalangue

PART II: WRITING AND POLITICS

Five: Autobiography as Effacement

Six: Crystallization

Seven: On Revolutionary Suicide

Eight: The Real and the Apparent

PART III: ART AND PHILOSOPHY

Nine: Corpus Exanime

Notes

Index

Preface

Le Noir n’est pas (Frantz Fanon).¹ The essays presented here proceed from a long meditation on the meaning of Fanon’s troubling idea of the n’est pas, undertaken in an effort to understand—through a philosophical-genetic approach—how this notion exceeds the categories (as well as principles) of blackness as meaning or concept.²

First, the book claims that the n’est pas cannot be determined as experience or representation—more precisely, its excess can neither be subsumed nor reproduced as Dasein, for it frees blackness from any obedience to ontology, and so detaches it from any servitude to philosophy. This book thus avoids any ontological—or more exactly, eidetic—attempt to reveal the n’est pas. The n’est pas cannot be measured in terms of being, since its subtracting intuition surpasses limitlessly the sum of those intuitions that saturate it; the n’est pas should rather be called an incommensurable, or immeasurable, abyss. This lack of saturation, however, does not always or even first of all suggest limitlessness; it is often marked by unforeseen crystallizations, permitting different aggregations to be foreseen on the basis of different arrangements and effects. As the crystallized phenomenon passes beyond all finite summations—which often cannot be seen—all syntheses must be abandoned in favor of what Fanon calls the abyssal whose infinitesimal end precedes and surpasses compositions of being.

The n’est pas must also account for how those saturated depths occur in their exorbitant splendor and wretchedness.

When Fanon introduces the n’est pas it is to question how blackness is what is given to be seen, each time, according to a perspective that is total as well as partial, conceivable, and always comprehensible. The n’est pas is not limited to these registers; nor is it a thought of disclosure to be affirmed and confirmed as such. The n’est pas shows us how our intentions and intuitions are often cut off from the real; that our perspectives prevent us from knowing and recognizing how our vision is structured by irreal elements, and so, how we are led astray by our own passions and attachments. At each stage of our descent, we see something emerge as chaotic, monstrous, and react to it in pain and distress; but we are unable to attain it, being equally incapable of telling apart knowledge from something lost or desired. In this way, the saturated depths cannot be foreseen, for the delusion that saturates reality, forbids black particularity from being distinguished as particularity, thereby annulling its possibility as invention. Consequently, because these depths could not be intuited, all possible paths leading down to them could also not be foreseen. Similarly, the n’est pas challenges the conatus essendi³ of being, from being considered apart from race war and a black will to power. Black power is, in fact, a power that is beyond power. It is not an object to be had—it is a power that begins by withholding itself and thus remains inconceivable to any object as its effect. The n’est pas must thus account for the ways in which conatus goes to war against blackness as a power which is neither true nor the good. It must teach us the cure for our powerlessness, and precisely because blackness can never be the means of obtaining a cure. In this sense, blackness is strictly an auto-immune relation in which every struggle to discover and appropriate it ends in suspense and incomprehensibility.

Let me note, however, two points to avoid misunderstandings. The status of the analyses offered here remains to be determined. Moreover, there is no terminology that can convert or translate the n’est pas. Neither judgement nor freedom are up to the task, nor spirit or revelation. Unlike certain themes of philosophy or psychoanalysis, the n’est pas does not coincide with either mastery or knowledge; nor is it a presence grasped in representation and its concept; nor is its meaning hidden in the semantics of the verbal form to be. I say absolutely that the n’est pas does not constitute a concept—it is the dark invisable of reason—for it is not determinable or meaningful.⁴ Nonetheless, the relation between blackness and the n’est pas presupposes certain relations. To make sense of those relations this book has recourse to the notion of effacement. This word is not a metaphor. But it does manifest a structure, as Lacan might say.

A privileged example of effacement is found in the existent. In the modern era it has been the fate of black life to be valued according to its nullity and its fungibility. If to live means to fulfill the freedom of one’s essence, to reach it without hindrance—immanently; and only what is free can be judged as living, black being enters history as the definition of unfree life that also undoes the relation between being and existence. The sign of this unfreedom, whether in law or politics, is manifested by the corpus exanime, which is the relic of a life that is above all not living, and whose existence causes a ripple or shudder in those living on. According to Fanon, this corpus exanime affects us even before we know what it is, or rather precisely because we know it only delusorily: as méconnaissance. Misrecognition offers us only a semblant life (we could also say an image that effaces), and yet is, at the same time, imposed on us with a power such that we are submerged by what shows—and thereby hides—itself, to the point of fascination.

Another privileged example comes from art. To love only the art that plunges one into total darkness is to make an idol out of darkness.⁵ It is not to grasp how black art is the sign and worship of its own darkness. The n’est pas crystallizes this semidarkness, but not as revelation or enlightenment. For it foresees what art cannot foresee, i.e., that darkness cannot be aimed at, meant, or intended. Consequently, the n’est pas precedes any apprehension that wrongly applies knowledge (of the object) to the non that unfolds as the black excess (of form, materialism, or structure). The n’est pas is not merely a fact of structure.⁶ Such a thought is too pious. But the n’est pas is not pious—or more precisely, it is because it is not limited to a black imagining of form that it passes beyond any piety of form (it has no connection to form as affect). In that sense, it is as opposed to aesthetics as it is to religion or any other form of consolation. It is the dark invisable of reason. As for us, the art that opposes itself to the judgement of form is not thereby opposed to violence, the saving violence of form, the lawful violence of the tabula rasa. Only the art that wages the cruelest war on black pain and suffering makes the n’est pas appear. This art that crystallizes the n’est pas destroys us. It destroys the law that makes blackness complicit with the suffering pain of its existence. As such, this art is directly experienced as the unbearable.

Accordingly, the n’est pas cannot be borne. This consideration derives solely from realizing that when the black gaze cannot bear what it sees, it suffers effacement, and, because what cannot be borne, concerns what cannot be seen—the thought that is nègre to thought—then to think the n’est pas is to think what we are incapable of knowing and incapable of reaching. It concerns an effacement that our being cannot sustain. This effacement informs what is recognized as our necessary weakness, because it keeps within the limits suggested by our idealizations and fantasies. We have so little knowledge of the n’est pas that we do not know it (how it invades our thoughts, and all the forms of consciousness and unconsciousness). Disturbed as he is by the contemplation of the n’est pas in his own being, Fanon dares to say that blackness is not capable of recognizing it—as a thought, or cogitatum. Indeed, he says that we suffer from a bedazzlement that tries to universalize our wretchedness instead of trying to think it—or think it better. But I would suggest that this is because we are weighed down by it, that is to say that our wretchedness weighs too much, and precisely because blackness is so weightless a thought. There is no doubt that this weightlessness is heavier than the world. Beyond the in-itself and the for-itself of the disclosed, this weightlessness burdens me; it burdens me in my solitude and in my exile from the world; it burdens me because it causes me to fall, without end, without protection and without defense, in oblivion. But it also burdens me with a strange dishonor which harasses me from the first moment each day. It is easier to bear this weightlessness than to see my dishonor exposed: what else can I do, given the insecurities, fears, and miseries of black existence? For the author of Black Skin, White Masks, black being has become something empty, weightless, yet quickly evaporating, lost to itself, expelled from itself in so far as it is a desire without ex-sistence.

This is why blackness cannot be too much occupied and distracted, that is to say, when we imagine that judgment and justice in the world will unburden us of our cares, we are advised to avert our gaze from the n’est pas, and to keep ourselves fully occupied with the promise of the mountain or tabernacle.⁷ Therefore, if you can see something in the darkness around you, and if you can find something to hold onto in this limitless, unfathomably deep loss of experience, why, if the n’est pas is so removed from knowledge or object, does it reveal to you this absence in your essence, why should you not be able to know, with an even greater certainty of reflection, what the n’est pas reveals to you as the invisable? In this dereliction—which I am imagining was also Fanon’s—we experience the n’est pas as a nearness that is also impossibly far. The n’est pas, according to Fanon, identifies here an informe—not of being—but an informe that is without form, for it subsists as the dark tain of every mirror. These mirrors show us that there is another world, but only the abyss leads us there. It follows from all this, first, that these mirrors conceal nothing but our own disappearance, so that we only become visible in our disappearance, or that disappearance from life is what defines black life. Secondly, wrapped in such cloaks of disappearance we cannot even see whether we are enrobed or denuded. There is thus an intolerable presumption in such arguments, although they seem to be based on an illuminating wisdom, which is neither sincere nor reasonable, unless it makes us admit that, since we do not know of ourselves as we are, we can learn it only in the incommensurability of the seldom seen or found.

Part I

Ontology and Language

How does blackness take place in language? Is language subjected to blackness instead of only representing or enunciating it? And if so, when Fanon writes of blackness, that it is n’est pas (is not), where should one look to make sense of this n’est pas? One could look to philology (see Chapters 2 and 3), not in the sense advanced by Edward Said or Paul de Man, but in the sense advanced by Werner Hamacher, who writes, in Minima Philologica: Philology emancipates the interval from its border phenomena.¹ This definition makes evident that philology is more than a rhetoric of topoi and tropes, for what it discloses are the spaces in between history and phenomenology, or grammar and rhetoric. Thus appears those black swarms or magnitudes that surpass the spacing of time (topos) and the time of spacing (trope) that are so evident in what Lacan calls lalangue (Chapter 4).² Those black intensive magnitudes do not, however, prioritize philology. For even when Said defines philology as the detailed, patient scrutiny [of words in their ‘worldliness’]; and de Man defines it as mere reading . . . prior to any theory, neither definition can make sense of the n’est pas.³ Both end up with philology as the effect of something prior: language and/or reading. Said, for example, writes: reading is the indispensable act, the initial gesture without which any philology is simply impossible.⁴ The act of reading is thus said to form part of the moral-political obligation that makes philology possible; namely, to subvert and affirm humanitas as the essence and priority of world literature [Weltliteratur]. What is never put into question is philology as the topos where reading makes legible its own genealogy as a history of interpretation.

De Man also shows himself to be more interested in topos than that of the n’est pas, and to that end cannot teach us how to read black texts.⁵ Does his idea of philology, as a philosophy of rhetoric, offer us nothing else but an encounter with language, an encounter with its baffling apriority? Is this why he repeatedly returns to the word prior in his return to philology? Hence his evident interest in the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces, and the teaching of literature as a rhetoric and poetics prior to it being taught as a hermeneutics and a history. To return to philology is therefore to return to the priority of language over history or hermeneutics, or to return to what we cannot conceive, or barely receive, without confronting this prior question of apriority. Language is therefore always prior—and subsequent—to the return that illuminates it. That illumination arises from philology’s blindness. Like Oedipus, its blindness is both prior to, and what establishes the priority of, its transgression. Whoever finds himself smitten by the love of words owes this love, most often, to the return that overlooks the priority of language to philology. There is no cure for such blindness, for the only means of obtaining clear sight obliges us to put out our eyes in our returning to it.

Philology is thus doubled: it is always the trope of a return that language and/or its reading makes intolerable, not to say miserable, because philology is always the effect of the return it produces. The question then arises as to what this return is symptomatic of—or coincident with? As if the dispute over which return was warding off the greater anxiety, their shared recognition that what is prior must come from somewhere else, from outside philology? An apriority that cannot ever be reconciled with, or decided as, philology? In following these arguments, I should make it clear that there is no basis for making one concept of priority take priority over the other. For to argue in these terms is inevitably to maintain the apriority that marks the limits of philology’s return. But what is revealed by the n’est pas is contrary to this pathos or dialectic; and thus explodes the idea that black philology can ever begin in the sublimated return to itself. Whence the insistence that in these two rivalrous returns, nigra philologica is never, in fact, returned to, but precisely forgotten in the return to it. Of course, de Man’s emphasis on structure rather than on historicity, on rhetoric rather than on hermeneutics, is explicitly reversed in Said’s own return to philology. Here priority is not so much a sight blinded, but the means, the mediating point, where history meets wisdom in imaginative understanding. (Mediation is also the great principle of black philology and the great principle of its worldliness. See Chapter 2.) The idea that philology can be equal to the historicity of language via a dialectic of imagination, is to know the constraint they [literary texts] impose on us [and presumably also the constraint we impose on them?].⁶ To read is to acknowledge the mutual constraint of duty and obligation; fidelity to the text—in its worldliness—is the means of obtaining historical wisdom and understanding. Once again, philology is what allows us to see the priority of topos without falling into blinding presumption. [P]hilosophy deals with the true, philology with the certain . . . both the true and the certain lay claim to belief, both to urgency, both to conviction. And: "Eloquence is what makes possible an understanding of the true and the certain . . . Eloquence involves not only the best use of words, but also their most copious articulation."⁷

Philology, in its eloquence, confirms and delimits truth in its certainty. But if, qua urgency, philology remains in exile from the world of conviction, it reintroduces warring incertitude into the belief on which it stands, and which is the true homeland of the mind. At once the best, most copious articulation can no longer be solidly established as the inviolable sign of the true and the certain; and the most eloquent philosopher finds himself in the world of uncertainty. He speaks in enigmas, aporias, ironies, and equivocations, as though he moved in a barren desert, as though he lacked the conviction to choose truth, as though he could not choose without wavering, as though, unsure and awkward, he was incommensurably poorer in these raids on the inarticulate. The most copious comparatist, the most eloquent philosopher none the less lacks all philological conviction. Philology speaks of its exile from the true and the certain, frankly, and has no conviction in its philosophical concept, which is like the unhappy incertitude of the mind.

In this first part I will suggest that such incertitude is necessary to black philology, otherwise it cannot grasp, and so defend, what drives its eternal return to, and exile from, our original nature in the homeland of our being. Thus, black philology is not the congenial pursuit of philía and alētheia as tropes of return, for it constantly needs to be diverted from the dread, misery, and dejectedness of its own apriority. These two contrary drives give rise to a confusion of trope and topoi, which leads black philology to seek satisfaction in the consolation of an imaginary originality—of world, race, and language—which can be returned to once it has overcome the obvious difficulties of knowledge and interpretation, and only then can it open the door to understanding and wisdom. Nigra philologica is the result of a constant wretchedness which is its own secret idealization. For how can it know—legitimate—itself without conflict over what, paradoxically, both founds and escapes it? But that dispute also conceals a more wretched outcome in the reading of philology itself; namely, the perpetual struggle of renewed idealization that also craves the threatened miseries that root it. Hence the excitement of knowing, of conceiving the properties of ancient languages that are indeed boosted by the endless, insoluble problem that they exist for us only as what could never return.

That is why philological knowledge [Wissen] is said to emerge from a principle of "perpetually renewed understanding [perpetuierte Erkenntnis]" without end.⁸ For this is how philology establishes the unique, unexampled truth that is the foundation of its reading.⁹ Unique and unexampled: for philology is not just a dialectic of knowledge and judgment, but an ideal (of critique and historical judgment) that must delude itself into imagining that each text is indubitably itself but also the unexampled ideal of its own unity. Moreover, this unexampled uniqueness is never arbitrary nor unambiguously final. For the understanding which constitutes this uniqueness, and which gives it historical life, is the outcome of an interdependence—a mediation—of philological cognition and understanding [Erkenntnis].¹⁰ Why this dynamic mediation? Because philology attends to the unique as a deciphering operation. As such, every ciphering operation is dissolved again into the cognitions from which they arose.¹¹ Dissolution occurs essentially as a disclosure of language itself. According to this unique unexampled singularity, philology is not only a deciphering that reveals or discloses. Rather, philology does not resist resistance (as operation), but guards it (in its singularity). The point is not to unclose apriority, in the sense of a return. Rather, one can only decipher philology’s own enciphering priority. Thus, what is posited or asserted entails a process of deciphering that must be "understood as written in cipher.¹² The foundations and principles of such hermeneutics is therefore compared to a lock that snaps shut again and again, and explanation should not try to break it open," for to seek a key to such hermeneutics only works to close what is already closed off.¹³ And this is true for the reading of all texts. We must thus decipher not what is revealed, but the unique relation of language to its own black particularity: that particularity is always already posited by language, and so prior to the limits of judgement, but what is hermetically written is also precedent to predication or knowledge, for what it signifies is both prior to the lock and its closure. Or, if you prefer, what black philology is concerned with is the ever-singular emergence of the n’est pas that escapes both dialectical sublation and the conventions of sense. If it is heresy to reduce the singular to exemplarity, black philology is heretical in interpreting the is not as the task of all textual understanding.¹⁴ Because it consists of singular occurrences, the n’est pas speaks everywhere where black life is (not), in its most enciphered modalities. The n’est pas speaks in every black interlocution but is also incapable of ever being said. Rather, the n’est pas is where black language denies, unknows, and doubts itself. When confronted with the n’est pas, blackness is the beingness that consists, but cannot be thought, in terms of apriority. But then, it is what remains to be said which becomes the problem of its philological understanding [Erkenntnis], since the unconcealing of black uniqueness never takes into account what is unconcealed by the n’est pas—its refusal to be mediated subjectively in cognition.¹⁵

But is there another way of thinking about blackness and the language of black texts? My focus on Lacan’s neologism lalangue and on the African trope of Esu is not by chance (Chapters 2 and 4). Indeed, when Lacan writes of lalangue in La Troisième, he also says ce n’est pas par hazard (it is not mere chance) that it occurs in language.¹⁶ Lalangue is not subject to chance, for, like Esu, lalangue shows us the wondrous splendors made possible by language. The collisions of signs, signifiers, or tropes made possible by lalangue also make manifest letters whose singularity is not mere chance (n’est pas). Lalangue is an attempt to account for these amazing manifestations that trouble and oppress any certitude of language in analysis. Lalangue is the manifestation of homophony, but homophony is not the congruence of meaning and chance. Lalangue renders possible what happens before language happens, whether as alterity, form, sign, or event. Perhaps this is why Lacan says that "the ‘non’ of denial and the ‘nom’ that names is no coincidence" either. If the homophonous structures of language (la langue) show coincidence they should not therefore be dismissed as merely coincidental. What can we infer from his analysis? It is interesting to note in this regard that it is due to Lacan’s focus on lalangue that he rejects the la langue of the linguists, but not entirely: to accept the echo between voeu (wish) and veut (want), for example, is also to accept the precedence that arrives as a prepossibility of predication (wish) or judgement (want) as such. The reason for doing so, and the only one to be found in Lacan’s writings after Seminar XX, is merely that the unconscious is also made up of various homophonies: the unconscious is that which lacks the ability to situate the coincidences (of lalangue) as topological or lingual possibilities. Even homophonies in speech situate a nonlinear relationship between sign and representation, language and contingency.

In this sense, I agree with Jean-Claude Milner when he writes: homophony "transforms radically everything that can be theorized about the Unconscious and its relationship to the fact of lalangue."¹⁷ He also says, "lalangue is homophony, but homophony does not belong to la langue."¹⁸ Why not? He offers us some intriguing answers. Firstly, linguistics resists lalangue. Or it does not see what coincidence—the symptomatic logic of its signification—offers to the ideal time and space of the sign in its enjoyment or possibility. In brief, homophony is immediately read as homonymy. Is that all they have to say? They also confuse the precedence of prepossibility, the n’est pas that precedes the positing of language, with the negative motif of arbitrariness (Saussure) or with the positive motif of homonymy (Chomsky). Linguists do not want to recognize the homophonous pre-essence of language in what they envisage as the coincidences of homonymy. Sounds and spellings may coincide, but that coincidence has no relation to meaning. It is clear then that it is only the doxa of langage that prevents them from accepting lalangue, and by their rejection they have become resistant witnesses; and, what is more, in doing so they remain opposed to the unanticipated, nonhomogeneous opening of a homophonous n’est pas within all language.

As a result of this n’est pas, just to be clear, I am referring to a lalangue that precedes its own possibility as lalangue as well as the concept and essence of an essential, noncoincident chance in language. It is not just that there exist homophonous phonemes, letters, word plays, parapraxes, and so on, that are not accidental, but that the n’est pas interrupts any philosophical logic of representation, namely, those examples by which the n’est pas of la langue occurs as lalangue—and only in this sense—becomes lalangue’s performance of itself. Indeed, it precedes language itself to such an extent that it remains ungraspable as language. Let us say that lalangue, being neither object nor law, is the unrepeatable and unfathomable trace in any time or sequence, network or code. In a word, lalangue has two essential characteristics. It is the [presignified] deposit, the alluvion that precedes the positing of language: it is the archi-lettering, in whose archi-communion or archi-sympathy a group handles its unconscious experience. (The word group brings together lalangue with that of community, and philology with that of an emotional bond or tie in a community of ends—we shall interrogate that proximity in what follows.) Consequently, lalangue echoes the not of the n’est pas in the marks or traces it leaves on speaking being. Once again, it is hard not to read these deposits as traces—a means of diversion and inescapable danger—that allow us to procure, without mastering, meanings that we would rather not know. What seems clear is that the question of lalangue and of mastery are intimately related to each other. The speech act that inadvertently confuses wish with want is not, at the deepest level, mere confusion, but the means through which the subject ardently, disturbingly, sets out in pursuit of their insatiable liaison.

Lacan uses the word swarm to describe lalangue’s manifestation.¹⁹ Swarm suggests something more than matheme, mathematization, or geometry. It suggests something more than law or code, knot or topology. And in order to make sense of this word we need to grasp lalangue as a kind of imminence, or pre-presence that is unmediated in the singular infinitude of this imminence, for these swarms can never be correlated to the ordering of syntagm or paradigm, nor that of semantics or concept. We shall be exploring these textures, independent of the signifier and notions of its mastery, in the pursuit of a black philology. We shall also try to account for the ways in which Esu, in his fecundity and mediation, echoes phileîn or lógos. But we must also acknowledge that the swarming magnitudes of lalangue cannot ever constitute a science, not least a philology.

Unless we bear these cautions in mind, we risk reading lalangue as mere play, performance; or as simply meaningless contingency. And if these are all pseudo-representations that is because they risk essentializing lalangue as simply horror or disturbance to a world of order. Perhaps this is why Milner evokes lalangue as an alternative to racism, the racism of representation, which he accuses of reducing the lettering of life to that of essence.²⁰ But is lalangue entirely separable from the lettering of a certain whiteness? And what does it show us, if not that there is a n’est pas that unsettles, disturbs, the white ordering of lalangue in Lacanian psychoanalysis?

One

N’est Pas

Fanon: le Noir n’est pas un homme.¹ And this other text, by Pierre Macherey, from an essay on Althusser and Fanon: Is not the racially interpellated subject "the spokesperson or the echo of a remark of which he is not, himself, the author, and which does not come out of his mouth in a spontaneous fashion, but which has been dictated by another voice, a voice that remains silent?"²

We have yet to understand the being that is not, whereby it is the echo of a silence that cannot be communicated except through gaps—ruptures—in language. How do we recover the moment of its silence, before it can be established in the realm of being, before it is bleached white by ontology or representation? We must try to hear, within this silence, the yet to be understood experience of blackness. We must pose the question of its being anew, before its reading can crystallize around the question of what it is, or, as Fanon conceives of it, is not, and the question of whether blackness should ever be considered a conventional form of humanitas. To describe this experience of non-being, this echoing that turns ontology on its head, as a voice speaking without authorship, without origin, and as though a voice overheard, is to know that blackness cannot be uttered without at once being echoed by a voice that is not: n’est pas.

This is doubtless more than a question of reading. To explore it we must renounce the usual methods of psychoanalysis or philosophy. We must never allow ourselves to be guided by what we may know of being (whether as an unasked question or as an alterity somehow unaccounted for or disavowed). None of the concepts of phenomenology, even and especially in the implicit sense of intentionality, consciousness, or affect, must be allowed to exert an organizing role. What is imperative is the gesture that attends to the undecidability of what blackness is, and not the science that reads it as invariably a question of force, power, ideology and violence (and I would add to that: identity, desire, and faith). What is originary—in Fanon’s phrasing of the n’est pas—is the caesura that establishes the distance between humanism and black personhood in general. This is why Fanon prefers other terms such as persona or mask. As for the hold exerted by ontology upon blackness as criminality, pathology, excess, one might say that undecidability characterizes these debates insofar as the n’est pas derives from this caesura from the start. We must therefore speak of the n’est pas without judgement, right, or obligation. We must speak of the n’est pas as something else entirely; and we must leave in abeyance everything that could figure it as a literal truth. To speak of the n’est pas is to speak of a void instituted between humanism and the limits of the human. For the n’est pas is absolutely other to what blackness is or claims to be.

Only then will we be able to understand why blackness poses a question that has yet to be formulated, and for which similarly there is still no answer. Indeed, the one thing that will keep us from understanding the n’est pas is inherent to blackness itself. To explain why let me briefly turn to the ambiguous ways in which blackness has been read by philosophy, or a certain philosophy; a reading that is, in a very originary and very violent way, unable to pose, let alone answer, what it is that makes blackness both black and undecidable. Here silence and speech, being and non-being are inextricably involved: inseparable since they are not yet distinguished, but are nevertheless misrecognized each as the other, the one in relation to the other, in the undecidable exchange that separates them and that allows neither knowledge nor testimony to prevail.

I

Let us see then how being echoes this n’est pas, and whether its echoing is ever given to experience.

It has become commonplace to say that a subject is subjected by what it assays. The classical analysis of ideology has shown how each subject is marked, assailed, by authority.³ Each subject is interpellated as if in response to the voice of someone speaking. And what is implanted is a whole causality in which the subject comes to know itself as substance, body, historical life; hence the subject is always the effect—the echo—of the voice whose authority it answers.

But whose voice? It is precisely this question that motivates Pierre Macherey’s critique of Althusserean interpellation. Where, Macherey claims, in the classical scene of interpellation, the question posed by the enigmatic call [appel] of ideology is understood by all because each is forced to answer from his or her place in language, and each is hailed (by a hey you!), why assume that we all turn around [retourné] in exactly the same way? Could it not be the case that there are some who are so very differently determined by the situations they find themselves in? Situations where the relation to the sovereignty of the state is at once the mark, the provocation, the insistence of something else; the result of an additional (not to say aberrant) separation? On the contrary, perhaps there are subjects who experience the effects of power not in terms of being seized, or that of a subjection revealed, as happens in the classical schema, but more in terms of being neither heard nor spoken to, but reduced precisely to the effect of an obliteration? If respect follows on from recognition, it is quite clear that there are those whose marked distinction is inscribed, and irreparably so, by nonrecognition. It happens every day. In persons of color, for example. Whence Macherey’s three challenges to the Althusserian formula:

(i) for the subject who is made to be black there is the feeling of not being a subject like the others, but a subject with something added, or perhaps we should say something missing; accordingly this subject "is not [n’est pas], like the one of whom Althusser speaks, a turned subject [un subject retourné], but a doubled subject, who is divided between an I and this more (or less) which cannot be recognized or connoted as such;⁴

(ii) whereas the Althusserian formula of subjection draws its efficacy from its purely verbal character: it is projected from behind, from a source systematically concealed from sight, the subject of color is constituted as such in the order of the visible, in plain sight, so to speak, and this changes everything; it is an actual encounter between two intersecting gazes;⁵

(iii) as such, one does not become a subject of color "except by entering into a relation [rapport] with others; a situation which, because it unfolds in plain sight, brings consciousness into the foreground and presupposes no reference to an unconscious [in contrast to Althusser who famously compares ideology to the unconscious]."⁶

In all three instances, the only universal rule is: the positioning of the subject by ideology is not delusory or imposed, and each turn is, in a certain sense, to give oneself up even more. But this does not justify the further belief that interpellation isolates the one who receives it, suspending the relations that he or she might entertain with other people, and merely because we are all considered to be subjected in exactly the same way.⁷ In other words, the privilege given to the retourné barely suffices as an account of social differences. In cases 1 and 2, Macherey thinks that the iconic "tiens, un nègre!" [look, a nigger!] from Frantz Fanon’s 1952 text, Black Skin, White Masks offers a differing account of subjectivation. Indeed, Fanon’s extrapolation of the effects of the tiens brings it much closer to the data of lived experience. Because Fanon’s (hey you!) is a phenomenology rather than a transcendental function, it does not issue in the specification of the subject (as simply seen)? How is that? In case 2, Macherey’s notion of an encounter in plain sight implies that there is no turning around for the black subject, just a gaze that fixes him⁸; but in case 3, which Macherey thinks comes closest to Fanon’s supposed phenomenology, sight becomes marked by a sense of objectivity that is more troublesome and is described as follows:

What first strikes us in this exposition is how it underscores the cumulative nature of the process by which is installed—in the mind of someone who, here, says I—the feeling of not being a subject like the others, but a subject with something added, or perhaps we should say something missing, since the addition in question is color, a characteristic with negative connotations, the absence of colorlessness: we begin with an observation, tied to the intervention of an external stimulus, an onlooker’s gaze on his body and his skin, an observation that exhibits an objective status from the outset; there then develops, in the mind of the one undergoing this test, a growing psychic tension leading from amusement, which is a form of acceptance, to the feeling that something unacceptable is happening, something strictly unbearable, at least under normal conditions.⁹

Whatever the virtues of Macherey’s general construal of Althusser’s theory (we will return to that question in a moment), it seems fairly clear that he has not at all grasped Fanon’s main argument in Black Skin, White Masks concerning le vécue du Noir. This may be because, just as Althusser’s account of ideology has to be understood, I am suggesting, on the basis of the universality of the linguistic or symbolic order, so Fanon’s own thinking of the subject who is made nègre, which we shall soon see is also indebted to a radical rereading of Sartre, also has to be understood on the basis of his earlier treatment of an apparently quite different account of subjectivation to which Macherey rather surprisingly never refers in these contexts. In that account, in which the ear and the eye are not simply solicited but held, so to speak, Fanon describes the moment when ideology speaks through the black subject as the feeling of being handed over to a gaze, a gaze that makes the visible inseparable from an absolute dereliction. This interpretation is not one of cause and effect—from external stimulus to psychic tension—for it is not certain that the gaze is reducible to any realist schema of apprehension. Its objectivity is not one of vision, but that of a quasi-transcendental structure that upsets the moi, the ego, because, strange to say, it makes the nothing appear that the subject already echoes. Inasmuch as the black is always on guard before any actual racist encounter, and inasmuch as this guardedness, moreover, is startingly focused on the unconscious ideology of negrophobia, what is manifested here is not an encounter with an alienating vision, but a nothingness now out in the open.

This nothingness is not something seen, in the form of an experience; but nor is it to be confused with an actual turning around. Hence, Fanon gives the example of a black philosopher on his way to study in France: How can we explain, for example, that a black man who has passed his baccalaureate and arrives at the Sorbonne to study for his degree in philosophy is already on his guard before there is the sign of any conflict?¹⁰ What Fanon puts forward here is in fact very different to Althusser and Macherey. In general terms: to be traversed by the gaze is not equivalent to a transcending subjection. The transcending here is of another order. Blackness is not the result of authority or subjection; it is the enigma of its own disquieting in-plenitude. The invasion of the tiens does not correspond to any object or representation. Yet it does make palpable a vertigo that is the result of a truly enigmatic interpellation. Or as Fanon puts it: the moi is on guard because it is surrounded by its own fantasy of intrusion, which it sends back, wards off, so as to eagerly await its certain appointment. What you walk towards is already within you, and what you so strenuously strive to avoid is already there facing you, fierce and inexorable. We are close here to an overwhelming sense of anxiety. It is indeed an anxiety, but strange, shifting, changeable. The moi is forced to say: there is something that returns, paralyzing reason, and is more intimate, more disturbing than any thought or call could be. If we refer back to this struggle as disquieting, what seems to be at issue here is a resistance that takes the form of a submission; and an enticement in whose ardent pursuit one comes abruptly to an end: as nègre. Here, body and sense remain indeterminate or can no longer be determined. I mean: the nègre has no meaning as essence and bears no relation to an object. What it does is to return (and not simply turn) the I to a nothingness that is absolutely exterior to being. The connection between vision and gaze, between word and identification, remains the effect, then, not of power, but of an endlessly traversable distance between subject and its hallucinated seeing of what cannot be seen. The imago is the best way of describing how vision gets clothed by a significance that empties it of sense, reference, world. The former acts as a confirmation, so to speak, that one was already subjected by the latter; the noir’s enigmatic relation to the nègre is already there, in me. Think of a machine that despises the moi, and precisely because the moi is the machine that despises the black form of interiority, at once wanting recognition and despising the need for it. To be hailed as nègre is hence always to be lacerated by the imago (the imago launches being beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward the nothing in its nudity, not only toward fantasy or discourse, but toward the coldness of a preexistence that extracts blackness from language, where it remains undeciphered, unknown). Thus, the feeling of a violation that is both absolutely other and radically intimate. Hence the effect of the gaze that is all the more intensely received because it is doubly impenetrable. The n’est pas does not encounter being but discloses a non-being beyond being—a nothing that is neither in language nor outside it.

Phenomenology cannot think the n’est pas because it can only think it as a negation, a finite encounter. But Fanon suggests something altogether different. There is a nothing that transcends being itself: an is not that obliterates being as selbst, subject, ipse. The black light of such a sun annihilates being as alētheia. Why! Because there is no light that can reveal the elemental and obscure ground of blackness as medium? Or because such a wish is conceited, pointless, uncertain? And there is always a risk of absurdity in such illumination. However traumatic the n’est pas may be, it persists as a monstration where all the threads are hidden.¹¹ Such threads reveal scars. But the hand that guides them, back and forth, is not strictly intentional, nor malicious. Anti-blackness is the façade, but what braids, or threads letters into words, words into voices, is a recurring hostility that is never simply ideology or apparatus. This is why the tiens is not a game of hide-and-seek (which belongs to the whole Althusserian-Hegelian ontology of recognition). For Fanon, in brief, recognition is subjection; but the gaze offers us a different dialectic, and it does so quite openly. The gaze does not reveal to us some petrified architecture. On the contrary, what it holds and grasps and darkens is not a call to subjection; but an impersonal non-moi invaded by an unlocatable sign. For what it reveals it also keeps secret, with the result that its revelation (in speech) introduces a kind of involuntary enigma, and one that leads us to imagine a flaw that is immanent to experience.

Consider, for example, the famously obscure opening of The Lived Experience of the Black Man (which comes just after the iconic tiens episode):

There is in fact a being for other, as described by Hegel, but any ontology is made impossible in a colonized and acculturated society. Apparently, those who have written on the subject have not taken this sufficiently into consideration. In the weltanschauung of a colonized people, there is an impurity or a flaw that prohibits any ontological explanation.¹²

Inasmuch as recognition gives us access to being, it dominates being, exercises a power over it. But when Fanon says black being is given to be seen, because it is obliged by being for others [für andere, l’être-pour-autrui], he presents a refusal, a denigration. Consequently, since the only thing that makes us human concerns vision, we are taken aback to discover an alterity that makes being impossible, prohibited, excluded from the genus as thoroughly wrong, flawed, prohibited.

What is this impurity that places me outside of myself, but that also nullifies self-knowing? And how is one to account for this flaw that speaks from the side of the real (that is, the place where what is seen is negated, prohibited)? This account of ontology as centered on prohibition is, according to Macherey, complicated by Fanon’s own treatment of the limit that speculation on the subject of being qua being encounters, that is to say, a being that is also "being qua not-being [être en tant qu’on n’est pas], which is not the same thing at all, but even that more complex account, in Macherey’s view, presupposes a being that teems with the unthought and the unsaid" (and of which Sartre’s notion of a néant de son propre être, mentioned in Black Skin, White Masks and of course in many other places by Fanon, and explicitly linked by him to a desire not to be), is a telling example.¹³ Macherey uses this account to underscore the point that racial difference has no experiential equivalent. But Fanon’s critique of ontology—of which the tiens scenario is a key illustration—suggests that there is a difference within the very category of difference that cannot be represented by or reproduced as difference even if we thenceforth read it as what results directly from the discovery of difference. Fanon’s extremely subtle point is that blackness does not have a language of its own, or: what it reproduces, what it utters, is a ventriloquy (in the proper sense of the term) that speaks by itself. In other words, contrary to the notion of interpellation, blackness has no articulation, for even its difference is borrowed; the result is a language whose idiom is that of the n’est pas. The relation between the Other and the black does not consist in vision but in an absolute difference. There is never such a thing as a relation or encounter; what the flaw reveals is a transcendence without presence, a certainty without security. This is why one cannot not feel its violation. Nor can one turn toward it, like Orpheus. For to turn toward it is to have it all the more inscribed as an epiphany that nègres (with each pas a surrendering to an infinity of the least). Consequently, the experience of the nègre removes any other that might delimit it. The black has no retourné—and its subjugation has nothing to do with reason or judgement. We recognize in it a flaw that overwhelms the entirety of its being.

The shock of such scrutiny, the disordering of being by disorder, must therefore serve as an example of why the n’est pas is not an experience, but a judgement in opposition to sociality.

The n’est pas, certainly, is a very paradoxical object: without figure, without oppositional term, without remainder. In short, it is what has always been said, but also what interrupts being-said: it is essentially what remains in place, by being out of place: a corpse that corpses.¹⁴ In Black Skin, White Masks, the problem of this n’est pas—the problem of situating the nonbeing of the black—is ontological rather than ideological, then, not because it starts from the problem of how people are subjectivated by their interpellation, but how certain subjects have to assume a being that is not in order to be recognized as subjects. For Fanon, as we know, this contrary situation takes on the unmanageable weight of a that within¹⁵ that can be neither introjected nor expelled (the moi is seized by it though it resists it; it opens the door to it even though the moi comes after its founding). In brief, non-being is not the same for everyone and, in fact, the being that is made not to be (n’est pas) is not entirely a question of ontology (and so is different from Sartre’s néant or rien). The placement of this n’est pas within a theory of ideology is therefore designed to solve a theoretical problem. That problem is not simply that of an unsaid (in Macherey’s